Home automation facilitates people to remotely control devices and appliances at home. The devices and appliances are integrated with the home automation products and people can access them using their smartphones and other mobile devices. In the last few years, home automation systems have seen unprecedented growth with expanding use cases from security to remote monitoring and accessibility of user homes. Many players have emerged offering state-of-art home automation products. To keep up with the market pace, enterprises endeavor to reduce time to market and costs by efficiently developing and testing their home automation products and solutions.
Conventionally, various systems and methods exist for developing and testing home automation systems. For example, developers and testers manually operate physical devices and appliances for developing and testing the home automation systems. However, the abovementioned systems and methods have several disadvantages. Manually using physical devices and appliances for development and testing is time consuming, lacks efficiency, repetitive, prone to human errors and judgment and poses many logistic problems. Moreover, the ecosystem of home automation solution with the presence of numerous devices (and corresponding models & versions) and appliances with longer product life demands backward compatibility and impacts interoperability between various smart devices, firmware version, device types and mobile device operating system versions. Therefore, majority of effort is spent on validating functionalities, regression and interoperability which results in less time for enriching overall customer experience.
In light of the above-mentioned disadvantages, there is a need for a system and method for efficiently developing and testing home automation systems. Further, there is a need for a system and method that leverages robotics for testing home automation systems. Furthermore, there is a need for a system and method that seamlessly and automatically facilitates end to end integrated testing of home automation solutions without the need for manually operating physical devices and appliances. In addition, there is a need for an automated system and method that reduces time to market, reduces errors and does not pose any logistic problems during development and testing of home automation products. Also, there is a need for a system and method that is device agnostic and capable of leveraging same test environment and testing scripts to validate interoperability of different types of smart devices from various manufacturers and compatibility of the home automation application with various mobile operating systems.